Daily Digest 5/20 – Fake Has Become Realer Than Real, Millennials ‘Playing Catch-Up In The Game Of Life’

by Daily Digest

Economy

While the Dow Jones industrial average has pared severe losses several times over the period as hopes for a settlement wax and wane with each Trump tweet or White House update, the Dow was down 178 points, or 0.7%,last week after recovering much of the losses suffered Monday and Tuesday. It has also fallen 741 points, or 2.8%, during the past two weeks.

According to the EBRI Retirement Security Projection Model, which was developed in 2003 and has been updated numerous times since, an estimated 40.6% of all U.S. households headed by someone aged 35 to 64 are projected to run short of money during retirement. This is based on a database of 27 million 401(k) participants and IRA account holders. This seems like a whole lot of households are going to run short, but it’s actually a decline of 1.7 percentage points compared with the same model in 2014 — so things are getting a little better.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are missives of choice for the middle class in matters relating to America’s monopolistic capitalist system. Predatory incursions into foreign countries resulting in bloodshed are routinely explained away in false-flag gibberish or in some other fashion to justify the actions of the government. This business of doing business attitude exists to negate everything else and the middle-class appear to have no qualms with this scenario. The sub-text here being, as God’s own people they believe that they have the right to expect ‘mana-from-heaven’ to rain down upon them from all quarters of the globe.

American millennials are approaching middle age in worse financial shape than every living generation ahead of them, lagging behind baby boomers and Generation X despite a decade of economic growth and falling unemployment.

Violence, especially random violence, is a complex manifestation of various thoughts, feelings, and external factors. When a multivariate analysis of these factors is conducted, it becomes apparent that it’s not just mental health issues that are leading to such an increase. There may be an underlying substance which plays a role in a high percentage of these violent acts – the use of prescription antidepressants, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

The move shows that the nation’s largest bank views the fast-changing world of payments as a battleground worthy of aggressive wagers. When it comes to keeping pace with emerging technology in lending or investing, J.P. Morgan has typically partnered with fintech firms like OnDeck or used its own engineers to build solutions like the brokerage app YouInvest.

Kurz said he was proposing to President Alexander Van der Bellen that a snap election be held as soon as possible. Van der Bellen, who can dissolve parliament, said he backed a snap election and would discuss next steps with Kurz on Sunday.

Even though these decreases were significant, other nations came in and made up for the declines. Leading the way was Iraq, which saw output climb 0.113 million barrels per day from 4.517 million barrels per day to 4.630 million barrels per day, nearly recovering from the drop seen from February to March. Libya and Nigeria saw their output climb 71,000 and 92,000 barrels per day, respectively, month-over-month, and even Venezuela, despite facing a substantial economic crisis, saw a modest uptick of 28,000 barrels per day (likely a recovery caused by the prior month’s decline of 0.281 million barrels per day that was in part created by temporary blackouts nationwide).

“It was really an interesting and fun opportunity to participate in the simulation exercise,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division, told Space.com. “I said it was fun because it was great to see so many people really thinking through all the various angles of how we would, as a society, an international human society, how we would try to deal with a potential threat to the planet.”

Also on Thursday, a Saudi-led coalition carried out airstrikes on Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. The deadly airstrikes, that reportedly left six dead, came after Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who control the capital, claimed responsibility for the Tuesday drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s critical oil pipeline. All of this, of course, isn’t being lost on global oil markets which ticked up on Thursday by more than 1 percent. Global oil benchmark Brent crude futures ended the day’s session at $72.62/barrel, up 1.18 percent, while U.S. oil benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were up 1.37 percent, at $62.87/barrel, near its highest level in two weeks.

Global scrap prices plummeted, prompting waste-hauling companies to pass the cost of sorting and baling recyclables on to municipalities. With no market for the wastepaper and plastic in their blue bins, some communities scaled back or suspended curbside recycling programs.

It is not uncommon for a presidential administration to use accounting changes to make its regulatory decisions look better than the rules of its predecessors. But the proposed new modeling is unusual because it discards more than a decade of peer-reviewed E.P.A. methods and relies on unfounded medical assumptions.

Gold & Silver

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Migrants Take Over a Wing of Paris Airport

A new form of civil activism by African immigrants in France. Migrants in France organized a sit-in to halt normal operations in one wing of the Paris Airport. They demanded and end to deportations and to talk with the Prime Minister about their demands.

I would classify this as the expected fighting by peoples over declining resources. It makes me very nervous. Who has a right to be here? As land, clean water and safe spaces get more scarce, who will control the shrinking pie?

It also brings up the issue of borders. Shall we defend our borders at the border, or let immigrants in and then later, find that we must fight them on the city streets?

A closely related question: How many immigrants will you let live in yourhouse? If the answer is none, then you must realistically admit that you oppose immigration.

The Maestro Takes the Stage Again

Even while feigning reluctance, the foundational attitudes on which the war will be based are set in the public mind.

The inevitability of the war is planted in the public mind

the US is “drifting” toward war with Iran—another example, as analyst Nima Shirazi quipped, of the “world’s superpower somehow having no agency over its own imperialism.”

If we can still call things “surreal,” that would describe watching corporate media do the same things they did in the run-up to the Iraq War, things they later disavowed: the credulous repetition of administration claims about the supposed threat; the reliance, for interpretation of “intelligence,” on officials with well known records for manipulating intelligence….

A May 13 New York Timespiece led with the statement that Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan had “presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said.” As researcher Derek Davison reminds, in a piece for LobeLog (5/14/19), there is, as the Times has acknowledged on other occasions, no evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons, at whatever pace.

Later, the piece says:

Some senior American officials said the plans, even at a very preliminary stage, show how dangerous the threat from Iran has become. Others, who are urging a diplomatic resolution to the current tensions, said it amounts to a scare tactic to warn Iran against newaggressions.

So that’s both sides; Iran is a dangerous threat or it needs to be prevented from “new aggressions,” though the piece doesn’t name any previous ones. Indeed, the Times quotes and leaves unremarked the claim from a National Security Council spokesperson that “the president has been clear, the United States does not seek military conflict with Iran…. However, Iran’s default option for 40 years has been violence”—a frankly mind-boggling statement that surely warranted more than frictionless transmission.

At the very end of the article, Davison reports, the Times throws in that National Security Advisor John Bolton has been pushing for war on Iran since the George W. Bush administration, and has already asked the Pentagon to plan for a military strike at least once, before these new supposed “troubling” moves from the country. But by that point, readers may have concluded that Iran is an emboldened rogue state, threatening the US and pursuing nuclear weapons – and the revelation that Bolton is trying to drum up a war with them might sound less unreasonable.